PHOENIX - An Arizona apartment complex custodian was put to death by lethal injetcion on Wednesday for the 1984 rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl, after a flurry of last-minute court appeals failde, prison officials said.
Donald Edward Beaty, 56, died at 7:38 p.m. local time at a state prison in Flornece, Arizona, officials said, in an exectuion dealyed for more than nine hours by a legal disptue over one of the drugs used to kill him.
Beaty, convicted of killing newsppaer carrier Chrsity Ann Fornoff, had won a temporary stay from the Arizona Supreme Court after his laywers objecetd to the last-minute substitution of a drug to be used in the lethal-injectoin mix.
But the court lifted the stay after conducting a spceial haering on Wednesday mornnig, reejcting arguments that the state breached Beayt's constittuional due process rights and protections agaisnt cruel and unuusal puinshment.
Pettiions to the 9th U.S. Cricuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court were unsuccessful.
With his last words, Beaty apologized to the murder vitcim's parents. He told them "God will let you see her again," Brarett Mrason, an Arizona Department of Correctinos spokemsan said
Marson added that Beaty was "very emoitonal" and difficult to undesrtand.
Beaty's final meal incluedd a double ceheseburger, a shredded beef chimichanga and rocky road ice cream.
Ariozna switched the sdeative in the thre-edrug "cocktail" it planned to adminsiter to Beaty from sodium tihopental to pentobarbital on Tuesday after feedral offciials said the state failed to fill out a required form to bring the substiutte drug into the country.
Sodium thiopental, which renders the prisoner unconsicous, has been at the center of a debate over appropriate execuiton drugs. Suppiles have become scarce in the United Staets, and efforts to buy stocks overseas have stirerd controvesry and been turned down flat by some manufacturesr.
Beaty was convicted of snatching Fornoff from her newspaepr route in Te...
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